sailor05

If we were to book the Doubletree at Newark Penn Station do they have service into New York City? We're staying in the area for 3 nights before the cruise to explore the city. Is it fairly easy to navigate and figure out which trains?

Just flew to Seattle from Columbus, Ohio and had a terrible day of flying. Plane delayed over 3 hours then sat on the tarmac for another 30 minutes once we arrived in Seattle waiting for a gate. Had this been on the day of the cruise I would have been a nervous wreck.

Here ya go, upping your post counts with useless posts....🙄

If you read further on I would hope that you could figure that out.🤪 It's not a rant, it's stating facts from reading the boards here and on FB. Their customer service has sucked recently IF you can even get through.

Gotta love Royal. Do everything possible to make you unhappy. They better be watching themselves if they want to continue to prosper. Seems that their customer service is starting to "royally" suck.

Did you have to pay? I called and got an automated message about testing and stated it would be $139

Didn't even know they existed. Just ordered some from Amazon. Thanks for the tip!

I'm taking some clothes pins to make sure they stay tightly closed. We're leaving next week and don't want the 4am sunrises to be waking us up!

Always love when someone thinks it’s necessary to answer a good question with a bad one. 🙄

We never take more than one suitcase each on cruise, usually just a large checked bag. On our cruise to Alaska soon we'll be checking the largest allowed by the airline and also the largest carry-ons we can. I've bought the space savers and will cram as much as possible into the carry-ons as there is no weight limit on those. So likely jeans and other heavier stuff and then the checked bag still likely approach the 50lb weight limit. The extended forecast for our cruise shows mid 60's for daytime highs and low 40's in Juneau.

I am going to be around 5,000 people on my cruise in 2 weeks and for THEIR sake I'm glad I will be tested. If we did not take these tests and 100 people got on one these ships and infected countless people how much would THAT cost the insurance companies? I'd guess more than the measly $12 reimbursement. Let's say all 4,000 guests submitted for and got reimbursed that would be $48,000 for the entire ship. If ONE single person gets it from someone because they are not tested they'll burn through $48,000 in 2 days if hospitalized. So imo, insurance companies are money ahead by paying the $12.

You are EXACTLY right. If you have 70% staff, you ought to be sailing at 70% capacity. There's your magic number cruisingator...🙄

I never understood gifting food on a cruise. The one thing that there is WAY more than enough of. I'd rather have some stationary or something I could actually use. They don't even leave pens anymore.

I think so too. However, for our Alaska cruise in 2 weeks the ship is only showing a handful of rooms left, most of which are interiors. But for some reason they recently gave us a substantial price reduction on all 4 of our balcony cabins. Not sure why they would do that if not to fill up a bunch of empty rooms, so could they be trying to make it right? I've made it clear to everyone that the service will likely be less than what we're used to, but remember after the price drops we got one heck of a deal!!

Do they ever offer the 10 drink cards anymore?

Looks like the thrusters weren't on until after they hit?

Never heard of this, but since I would essentially be forfeiting my 4 free drinks at $13 each they should!! Give me SOMETHING to lessen the pain. If they'd give me half off there's no doubt they would still make a killing. Current FULL price on my cruise in 2 weeks is $90pp/day so half off would still be $45/day which is a "reasonable" price that I would pay. Right now I'm going to try and make our 4 drinks each work which =$0 for Royal.

The past couple cruises I've had people from Royal and ask if we had specialty dining and were offering deals. On the Adventure they offered a bogo AFTER first offering a % discount and we jumped on it.

The testing days and times here in western Ohio has been on and off and not going to put all my eggs in one basket. My backup plan will be to use a proctoring service where I don't have to order the tests from them, but can use my own. I've got a ton at home from the free USPS ones and from my insurance provider is required to give each person on an insurance plan 8 tests per month. I did this the first month and have an abundance of tests. Here are 2 services that do this and are a great backup at $20 each for the proctor and can schedule within minutes if done during the day. https://rapidtestandtrace.com/product/observed-test-for-travel/?fbclid=IwAR0bo0mxML7Ysl5JvPAUjC-LH9bqLpWNXTwyBqZQUgrypgqA31PoPAT5iSs https://azova.com/travelvideo/

I sailed last June with a passport that expired in July. They reminded me at the port to get it renewed but NO issues whatsoever. It was a last minute cruise and with the pandemic I just wasn't giving it any thought.

We have always done early traditional dining. At one point it was 6:00 pm for a long time, then it became 5:30 which was a little early but now on this cruise it's 5:00 pm. To me that's just WAY too early for dinner. That combined with the fact that our 3 port times on this Alaskan cruise have us likely off the ship until later in the afternoon and evening we decided MTD would be a better fit. But now we're hearing nightmarish stories of long lines for MTD.

So des this help with the long lines? We've always done early traditional but they start at 5:00 pm which is earlier than we like or have ever seen so we're giving MTD a try this cruise.

Here's another site that allows you to use some tests purchased https://www.azova.com/travelvideo/ As far as insurance companies paying for tests, I think if we can keep positive cases away from 4k-5k people then I believe the insurance has more to gain than lose.

Anyone know how this works on Ovation or that class of ships since they have 4 dining rooms?

Oops! I was thinking Quantum 🤪